u/n_lens

Hello fellow meditators,

I sit twice daily, about 30 minutes each (sometimes more, sometimes less), and I've noticed a pattern I'd like input on.

I tend toward compulsive striving in practice — subtly (and sometimes persistently, over days or weeks) pushing toward certain states, or chasing a mental picture of "progress." For context: I carry a lot of internal heaviness and darkness (mental illness runs in my family), and I've sometimes had a meditation experiences where light and love flooded in. I've been trying to force that state permanently, or at least engineer steady progress toward it.

This "ends justify the means" approach is undermining my practice. Even when difficult states arise and sitting turns adverse, I catch myself unconsciously pushing through rather than allowing.

I recognize the pattern and am working on accepting it, but I'd welcome advice from anyone who's worked through something similar.

So my story has a lot of background which I'll pause on for now for brevity's sake. I started meditating nearly 2 years ago (It'll be 2 years on Aug 10 this year) and it's been a hard journey. I was previously diagnosed with schizophrenia, but now in remission.

Most of my meditation sessions were really hard in the first year, they brought up so much negative energetic content that I felt as physical sensations in my body (Thankfully not much mental content, except in dreams). Clenching, tightness, pain, burning and coolness alternating, across large parts of primarily the abdomen neck and head. I had a lot of suppressed content and nervous system was in freeze. I kept at my meditation routine a bit militantly/mechanistically - 2 sessions 25-30 min each per day (Total ~1 hr of meditation). I rarely missed a session. I often had unpleasant sensations or emotions throughout the day as well and I accepted these and allowed them into my body as much as I could, without resisting. Observing shame, grief, fear without being fully possessed by them (As much as I could because these were often very overwhelming and I needed to walk, stretch, take supplements or rest to discharge or reset).

After the first year and well into the second year I started to have occasional pleasant meditations - bliss (But not that deep), and a slight unification of consciousness in meditation. This was the first time in my life I felt such relaxation, it felt like my whole life had been an adverse experience. I sometimes meditated more, upto an hour. My physical capacity also started to increase (Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue and exercise impairment for the past 24 years), and I was gently exercising a bit more.

For the last two days I caught a virus and was in bed, not meditating, just relaxing with my thoughts (between bouts of checking reddit). And I felt this unfairness and vexing resentment at this adverse experience of life. Both my parents were highly unwell and dysfunctional, I pretty much ran away from home at 18 to start a new life in another country but it was all uphill. I was wound up so tight from the CPTSD of growing up in a very dysfunctional home with one abusive alcoholic parent and one mentally sick and mostly bedbound parent. I had a host of symptoms, chronic fatigue, exercise intolerance, sleep disturbances and gut issues. Eventually I healed most of those issues (With minimal help from the medical establishment) and I've made a life for myself but it was all so adverse, I pushed and pushed and pushed myself all upstream. And in the process I was unable to unwind the stress and trauma built up in my nervous system. Such tight energy that my muscles would often randomly clench, even in places I didn't know I had muscles like in the viscera. I had no space to decompress because I was an immigrant to another country and had to work hard, I had no one to rely on if shit went sideways.

Years later I'm healing through meditation and as there is space to decompress, all this crap is pouring out and it's just another layer of this shit sundae. I didn't seek escape through suicide because I had a Buddhist bent of mind and had this .... feeling... that escaping hardship through suicide would lead to a more adverse birth.

I had a therapist and psychiatrist and they mostly couldn't handle my issues, or rather I hadn't explored them enough myself to access any care they could offer me. It was just running to these appointments to get a bit of paid human connection that kept me afloat, and some medication that was a bandaid over the symptoms. I often think to Caesar's quote - It Is Easier To Find Men Who Will Volunteer To Die, Than To Find Those Who Are Willing To Endure Pain With Patience

Thanks for reading, and note that a lot of things in my life are indeed very positive and this is an account of some of the adverse parts of my life. My parents were later much more supportive after they healed some of their own issues and they put in tons of work into healing as well, over the course of their lives. But I also haven't included some of the more excruciating parts of my story.

Hi everyone — I hope this topic is welcome here.

I've been drawn to Buddhism and meditation since childhood, when my father used to take me to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. Lately I've been using Claude (the AI) to study it more seriously, and I wanted to share why.

As a lay practitioner without a teacher, I'd found myself lost. Buddhist literature is vast, and I kept getting tangled in the cosmologies and systems. My main interest is simple — liberation from the cycle of birth and death, which seems to be the heart of the path — but the sheer volume of material made that hard to hold onto.

I've also felt hesitant about seeking a teacher. Some of it is specific: the example of Japanese Zen masters endorsing the war effort in WWII sits uneasily with me. More broadly, I worry that much of authoritative contemporary Buddhism is caught up in survival forces — institutions more concerned with perpetuating themselves than with the teaching. That self-preserving drive is, I think, precisely what Buddhism points us toward transcending.

Against that backdrop, an LLM, occasionally inaccurate, but largely neutral and free of institutional agenda, has turned out to be genuinely useful. I don't know if it'll stay neutral into the future, but it seems to be for now.

A bit of context: I'm a software engineer, and AI is now standard in my work (ironically, software development is where it seems most effective). Working across different models, I've noticed, as have other engineers, that each has its own "personality." Claude's leans somewhat Buddhist in flavor; if you're curious, look up the "spiritual bliss attractor states" it can drift into, documented in Anthropic's own research. (Tangent, but OpenAI's models feel colder; a little better at coding, a little worse at most else.)

Using Claude to explore the suttas has been a real help to me as a lay practitioner without access to a teacher. I do think that a trusted human teacher is superior to AI, most definitely, but AI seems to offer an intermediate step similar to reading a book.